Hunger starts to strike in Afghanistan

As stated by those informed (Chomsky also brought this up in
his MIT
talk) hunger in Afghanistan among refugees is starting to
make its toll with many civilian
deaths.

"She hadn't eaten anything for 10 days," Baran said. "We have
no tent, either. She froze to death last night."

Baran brought his family to this camp outside the city of
Herat 10 days ago from Badghis. Like hundreds of other
families at Maslakh, which means "slaughterhouse," they have
no shelter and are not yet eligible for food distributions.

These people do not have to worry anymore about the evil
Taliban inflicting pain on them. They have been liberated and
released from these evil-doers. These people thank the
bombing for releasing their souls from the evil oppression.

Ximian Mexico

Went today to the Ximian Mexico offices and met with Israel,
Javier, Tambet (who is visiting town), Chema, Arturo.
Federico was missing as he spilled coffee on his keyboard.

Chema and I went to La Buena Tierra for an early dinner, and
then across the street for some coffe. Very good location
picked for the Ximian offices in Mexico.

I hug out all day with Mauricio. We mostly went restaurant
and coffee hoping all day until it was time for the Jaguares
Concert.

We ran into a few other friends at the concert, it was pretty
good, but I had the feeling that the singer was in some kind
of rush to finish singing a song. I might go see them again
in Boston on December 15th.

There is only one thing I have been afraid all of my life as a
programmer (besides revere engineering device drivers) and it
is to implement pointer dereference.

I have never been able to figure out why I am afraid of it, it
seems pretty simple in theory, specially with the CIL
bytecodes. But there is still something unknown in there that
makes me afraid of it. It is definitely material for my
shrink to study.

Anyways, in case you were wondering, I am still stuck in
mutator unary operators while Dietmar hacked ValueType support
and Paolo is quickly fixing System.Reflection.Emit bugs and
Dick is busy finishing the threading/locking semantics of Mono
to mimic the ones in Win32

webpage

I have been sprinkling my web page with a few pictures that I
have taken. I also discovered that the HTML table tag is not
as hard to use as I thought. One item less for the shrink.

House

Nat was still yelling at his computer this morning. I made a
mental note to investigate the matter in more detail later.

It is hard to believe that such a peaceful person like Nat
(see Exhibit A) could be yelling at a computer for 12 hours
straight.

Required-reading

I finished last week reading Howard Zinn's Declarations
of Independence. A required reading for every
american (or anyone trying to understand americans).
I am slowly going through my queue of pending books,
the next victim is Tragicomedia Mexicana (this one is to
understand how some people in Mexico got so rich, and
how others got so poor).

Ordered a desktop computer online. I just remembered that I
forgot to get an ethernet card for it and a monitor. Details,
details.

Mono

Ravi got
enumerations going in the compiler, very good news. I am
stuck handling a few non trivial cases for some unary
operators.

Movies

Saw Amelie
with Daniel.
Best movie I have seen in the last two years. Wonderful
movie.

Not only is the movie excellent, but it manages to capture the
spirit of Paris. Juantom�s had suggested in
Spain that I watch it.
I was in the mood to discuss the movie, but Daniel was in the
mood to get a sweater. When I got home, Nat was yelling at
his computer so I decided to purchase movies on amazon.fr as a
replacement to discussing Amelie.

Went to the movies with Duncan and super hacker Radek (which just arrived
this weekend to Boston) and we watched the Heist. The
Fandango internet-ticket thing did not quite work as
advertised so there was a long line of people waiting,
and we missed the first few minutes of the movie.

Radek

I got a chance to talk to Radek about Mono and .NET. He
currently works on GtkHTML
together with Larry Ewing for the Evolution project, but he is
looking for a spare time hacking activity.